jonb: You may have more luck trying to recover the data from the old laptop drive

You sir are a freaking genius! I'm recovering the files I deleted off the laptop as we speak.

The formatted backup drive however is still having some issues. GetDataBack found lots of files but the "recovery tree" dialog doesn't show anything. I may have used the wrong version of the tool though (there are FAT and NTFS versions). I am going to try the TestDisk utility mentioned in this thread too.

I have had good success with Glary UnDelete the few times I have deleted a file and then had the 'oh noes' moment. However it was on a disk that wasn't being written to, recovery was immediate and the disk had not been formatted.